Bleach Halloween
by HeraldHealer
Summary: Just a little Seasonal One shot ...Enjoy


"Oh come on, you've got to be kidding me," Rei muttered to herself as she looked at the blocked off street. If she had to double back she'd spend another whole hour walking back home. The unseasonable warm weather was beginning to fade and the night sky looked ominously like rain. She shivered and peered down an alley. She could see the light of her neighborhood on the other side flickering dimly. If she took the short cut she could be home in less than fifteen minuets. She shivered again, "Should have stayed in my costume I'd have been warmer." Still it didn't matter that she's walked down that alley hundreds if not thousands of times before, some thing about it seemed menacing and different tonight.

***

"Now I, Kurosaki Isshin, will tell the last ghost story of the night!" a patently fake Romanian accent caused the teens huddled around the grill roasting marshmallows to jump. The father of the host pounced from out of a tree toward his oldest child, wearing a pair of rattling fangs and a cheesy Dracula costume. Ichigo stopped his father's decent with a well placed foot to the face.

"Alright," Tatsuki crowed, "Indiana Jones 6, Dracula 0." The fire light glinted off her hoop earring and made her eye patch look quite sinister. Beside her Orihimi wore a costume that had started its life as a Medieval European lady's gown then had started to become gypsies' rags and tatters, then finally apparently had attempted to metamorphosis into a space suit.

"Dose anyone else know anymore ghost stories?" Chad asked. His tale of the Chupacabra, the goat sucker had been deliciously gruesome. His Darth Vader mask was pushed around to the side of his head. Keigo, also in rattling fangs and a melodramatic old fashioned evening dress shook his head.

"I'm sorry," Mizurio apologized. Compared to the two Dracula, the evening dress from his Phantom of the Opera costume looked suave. Slowly everyone else shook their heads.

"Kurosaki-san, if you know one we haven't told?" Rei asked hopefully. The Halloween party had gone from true dark to whatever the time was now. The stories had gotten progressively weirder and scarier as the night wore on. Isshin nodded and raised his opera cape in assent.

"Fine go for it," Ichigo shrugged and attempted not to look too interested as he made room for his father in the circle between him self and Chizuru who was going as Sailor Uranus.

"You all know the alley that connects thirty-second street to fifty-second street?" everyone leaned forward nodding. "Every Halloween night, strange things happen there. Most years in the morning they find some poor soul huddled in a ball curled up in abject terror. Those few who weren't driven completely mad spoke of invisible hands and blades. Nearly all had the bruises and cuts to show for it. But some years they find corpses, stone dead with a single mark on them to show how died." Isshin's face went dark. "Those fortunate few who manage to get out of the alley, well they say you can hear their screams for miles…" he trailed off and began to laugh manically.

***

"Darn Ichigo's dad for telling that story," Rei muttered to herself as she ran her fingers through her dark hair. Her gypsy costume was being laundered by Ichigo because she had been one to get drenched when his dad attempted to empty the punch bowl over his head because of Ichigo's comments about how anticlimactic the story was. All but the knife that her brother insisted that she carry for protection against drunks. Rei had agreed with her classmate at the time but now that she was standing in front of the aforementioned alley she wasn't so sure of that, not with it being one-thirty in the morning on Halloween night. Humming softly to her self to keep her spirits she strode into the alley intent on crossing as fast as possible without sprinting across.

She hadn't gone but five steps when raucous laughter behind her made her jump. She spun around, all muscles tense. She relaxed when she realized that it was a bunch of college students staggering out of a bar in a weaving cackling knot. She let out the breath she hadn't realized that she'd been holding. She lightly slapped both of her cheeks. "Come on, Rei, there's nothing out of the ordinary going on here. I'm just jumpy; yeah that's it, just jumpy."

Rei began to sing loudly as she took a few more steps. When she felt a hand on her shoulder she jerked free and spun around. "What the heck was that for?" she hissed as she moved. Her eye's widened in shock. There was no one, absolutely no one, anywhere behind her as far as the eye could see. She reversed trying to catch the bastard who had startled her, but the alley was completely deserted. As the color began to drain from her face something shoved her hard in the shoulders, sending her staggering in to an invisible wall. Her voice caught on the lump in her throat.

Ok, maybe it wasn't a wall; something grabbed her right hand and she felt herself being lifted off of her feet and spun around three times in what could have been a waltz. As suddenly as it picked her up it threw her into the wall of the alley. She staggered into a run, determined to make a break for it. Disembodied malicious laughter followed her.

She hadn't gone five steps when something grabbed her wrists forcing her arms behind her back. She brought her foot down hard where she judged an invisible foot should be. All the reward she got for her efforts was a sore heel and her arms being forced upward until her elbows locked and her wrists were caught behind her shoulder blades. The pressure increased until she was forced to stand on her tip toes to keep her shoulders from being pulled out of socket. Her hair fell around her face, and she turned just in time that out of the corner of her eye she saw her hair ribbon flutter to the ground sliced in two. An invisible hand twined it self into her hair and forced her to face straight ahead. She felt rushes of air all around her body, anywhere skin was exposed. It felt for all the world like some one was touching her with a blade too lightly to draw blood. Some thing in her snapped. Fear and frustration fermented into a boiling anger.

"Damn you! Let me go you bastard son of a mountain goat and a porcupine!" she shouted as she began to struggle furiously in spite of the pain. She brought her heel violently upward in an attempt to kick what ever invisible fiend that held her in the nuts but before she connected with anything she was flung to the ground with enough force to knock the wind out of her. As Rei lay panting she felt her self being drawn upright. If she closed her eyes it felt like a man had pulled her into his arms. Her wrists were pinned in her lap. It took her completely aback when what ever it was kissed her.

That completely freaked her out. She might have screamed but that wasn't really possible at the moment. The kiss could have almost been called tender, but it was more like being caressed with controlled power. Whoever or what ever took his or its time, a taunt and an implied threat. Some back corner of Rei's brain hoped that she wasn't being molested by a lesbian ghost. The rest of her brain ignored that as irrelevant. As soon as it let go of her she scrambled as far away as possible. Desperately she wracked her brain for something that might pass for an exorcism. She latched onto the first thing that came to mind and pointed in front of her as she declaimed: "Be ye prophet, bird of devil! Get ye back to night's Plutonian shore! Dominus possum pax probiscus, post mortem, et tu brute, puella carborundum!" She heard the creepy laughter again and something pushed her arm to the left twenty degrees or so. She thought she could hear voices but she couldn't make out what they were saying. "Deep shit, deep shit, deep shit," she repeated in a mindless litany as she turned again toward her neighborhood and ran for all she was worth. She tripped on nothing measuring her length on the ground. That didn't even slow her down.

What did slow her down was that she sensed something in front of her. She skidded to a halt just in time to brush her nose up against what felt like fabric. A warm breath blew her hair away from her eyes and a voice whispered "Boo!"

Rei grabbed the knife out of her belt and tried to stab the air in front of her with all of her strength. What ever it was she almost plowed into grabbed her wrist in mid air in an unbreakable grip. The knife fell from her nerveless fingers. As it spun to the ground her arm dropped to her side. The knife rose on its own accord and began to twirl idly in the air. That was the last straw; she didn't even waste her breath to scream. Rei tore out of the alley way, followed by the cruel laughter.

Rei practically flew home taking the shortest possible rout. She cut across yards, dogged dogs, and vaulted over mail boxes. She made the usual fifteen minuet trip home in nearly five. She stumbled into her own yard puffing and wheezing and nearly tripped over the stairs on her porch. "I'm home, I'm safe," she muttered to herself. She flinched as she felt something brush up against her leg, and then sighed with relief as she realized it was just Kuro-chan, her kitten. As she bent down to pick up the cat she heard wiz something over her shoulder. She spun around furious at what ever trickster who thought to prank her after what had just happened.

"Screw you too, you bastard!" she shouted over her shoulder as she picked up Kuro-chan. Then she stood up and looked at the door. There was a knife quivering in it at head height with a tag attached to it. With exaggerated care she put down the kitten and looked at the tag. The tag bore the message, written in an old fashioned hand, 'Happy Halloween'. Then Rei realized that the knife was hers, the hilt one of a kind. She stared at it in shock for a moment Kurosaki-san's words echoing through her head. Then she screamed, as high as her voice could go and loud enough to wake the dead.

***

The two shinigami captains strode down the street the sound of the screams growing fainter with each passing block. "My, my, I'm a thinkn that, that mighta been tha fastest runner we've had yet. Ya didn't let 'er go on purpose, did ya?" Ichimaru Gin could barely talk for laughing.

"I'm not the one she slipped by," Aizen Souske pointed out. "The look on her face when you started twirling her knife was truly priceless." Soul Society would have been shocked to see the casual cruelty in his eyes, accustomed as they were to his pleasant mask. "It would hardly been polite for me not to return her knife to her, Gin. Especially since, you have far better than that little knife."

"Not nearly as good as the look she got when ya kissed her Captian." Gin's creepy smile faded slightly. "It's too bad we can't be a staying out all night to play tha game, this year." Aizen nodded as he walked off to return to his division by a different path.

"My apologies, but my shadow is feeling a bit ill tonight, and I need to take care of her before morning." With that he disappeared, leaving Gin to find his own way home.

The captain of the third division began to sing a song he'd grown rather fond of in the past few years to himself in a surprisingly clear tenor. "Boys and girls of every age, would you like to see something strange, come with us and you will see this, our game on Halloween." He broke off and laughed, an odd low chuckle, as he turned his face to the blood red crescent moon. "I love this holiday!"


End file.
